Workshops and presentations

In this workshop, you will experience two different ways to do a movie talk: one high prep with screen shots and one low prep. The demo will be in French for beginners. I will also present a variety of activities to do after a movie talk and we will discuss ways to incorporate this activity in your classes.

Brain breaks are short activities that allow your students to move their bodies and for a few minutes to do something completely different, so that their brains get a 'break'. However, in a CI class, even the brain breaks will be done in the target language, and will thus still provide comprehensible input. In this workshop, you will learn how to create and perform this type of brain breaks.

Story Listening is a method based on the Dr. Stephen Krashen’s Input Hypothesis. The method was developed by Dr. Beniko Mason, who is a Reading and English teacher, as well as researcher in Osaka, Japan. You will receive a handout with information about the underlying research to better understand why Story Listening works so well for language acquisition. 
In the workshop we will focus on how to prepare a lesson and how to use Story Listening in the classroom. 

Science says we need many repetitions to anchor the new structures in our long-term memory, but often we get stuck at finding ways to provide the repetitions without getting bored ourself or being boring for our students. In this presentation I will show (and we will discuss) different levels of teaching and ways to provide repetitions without being repetitive: repetitions all over the years, repetitions during the school year, repetitions in a unit and repetitions of a structure in different activities

In this workshop you will experience what Date Talk is. I really teach Date talk every class. That ranges from talking about the calendar and about the weather to talking about an event that happened on that day in history. Through a demo lesson in French, you will see how a Date Talk works and afterwards I would like to tell you more about how to prepare it, where to find the information, the pros and cons, etc.

This highly engaging game for the language class (all languages!) is a variation to the werewolves game (also known as the mafia game), specifically designed for use in larger groups. The game gives ample occasion for comprehensible storytelling and for asking lots of questions. You can already play this game at a very basic language level, and build on that basic language every time you play it again. In this interactive workshop, you really experience this game as a language learner. You can choose to engage in play or to observe the game. 

Do you like to play games with your students, but do you have a hard time doing this in the target language? Or are you simply looking for more games to add to your repertoire? Then this is the workshop for you. I will show you how to incorporate games as a tool of repetition of the target language, in a CI manner, and we will play some games together.

Through a demo lesson in Swedish, you will see how I have Personal Conversations with my students. Then I would like to tell you more about how you can also do this in a group with illiterate students. I hope to welcome you to my workshop!

Stories are an extremely powerful tool for language teaching. They provide a solid foundation for engaging learners with memorable comprehensible input that allows our students to internalize language in ways not possible with traditional teaching methods. But what can we achieve with stories beyond language teaching? In this presentation, participants will explore the psychology of stories and why our brains crave them. We will dive into ways we can use stories to go beyond language instruction and develop our learners’ social emotional competencies by helping them connect to self, others, and the world around them.

There are many ways to provide comprehensible input in the language learning classroom. Story-asking with TPRS is one of those ways. In this workshop, participants will actively participate in a story-asking lesson and learn how to establish meaning in a variety of ways; use questions to increase repetition of key vocabulary and grammar structures; and use student-generated art and story formulas to guide story-asking in their classrooms. Participants will be guided step-by-step through the process with several opportunities to practice along the way.

Experiencing a CI-class as a language student is one of the bes ways to get a feeling for the effect this way of teaching has on your students. And what would be more special than taking a Latin class. Who speaks Latin anyway? Well... CI-teachers (and students) do!

This workshop is designed for teachers who either have a novel unit they are not happy with OR who are new to teaching novels. You will walk away from this workshop with concrete, engaging, low-prep or re-usable activities that will allow you to teach novel units that are a blast for your students AND for you. This workshop is for teachers who either want to add interest to their novel units without devoting hours and hours to planning or who haven't taught a novel before.

In this workshop you will get to know a lot of games that can be used as ice breakers, brain breaks or as a starter for a new story (tableaux vivants). The games proposed mainly come from actor training. Their aim is to get to know the group members, to get confidence in moving around freely, in playing and acting with the others. Our main purpose here will not be "how to act out", but to play and react spontaneously to what happens in the moment, to stimulate free associations and stop the inner critic. Not everybody expects to play in a school setting or is ready to do so. Playfulness is an invitations to have fun, to lower stress and to leave all worries outside the classroom. We will also discuss how to introduce playfulness in different students' groups. Participants will be invited to share their own experience.

Newcomers to CI, and even those with a few years of CI-based teaching under their belt are often unsure about how to introduce and practice the written form of L2. I will give a very detailed, step-by-step method (and a bag of tricks and activities) that helps participants create a literacy-friendly classroom environment that encourages learners to start reading and writing without any effort or feeling forced. Reading and writing can be just as natural and effortless as learning to understand and speak a new language.

In this workshop you'll be introduced to the basic principles of TPRS in a practical way: by creatively making a story with each other in Turkish. You don't know the Turkish language yet, but while story-making you are acquiring it. Afterwards you will read another short Turkish story with ease, because reading is recognizing acquired vocabulary. You'll explore together how it was possible to understand and apparently acquire the language. And after that you'll be introduced to the used questioning technique and you will practice it yourself while being coached.

In this workshop, I will show how you can relate Picture Talk to your students, to their lives, their experiences, their ideas and thoughts. How can you do this in groups of students without a common language? And how can you do this without written support?

Grej is Swedish for ‘thing’. So this is about 'the thing of the day', and the ingredients of this dynamic activity are: a riddle, a short lesson, 'wow-facts', retelling and relating. In this workshop, I will show you how you can incorporate the principles of Grej of the Day in CI-based classrooms. I will start with a demonstration in German of about 5-10 minutes, depending on the skill-level of the group. Then a 10 to 15 minute background presentation. The goal is to let everybody leave with a ready-to-go "Grej des Tages" lesson for your next class!

Do you feel like you are flying blind with regard to how to combine your teaching obligations with CI methods? Do you often find yourself worrying about what to do for your next lesson? If you want to free up headspace with a clear structure for your lesson planning on a macro level, this workshop is for you. I will share my own methods for navigating the curriculum at a German state school and we will develop some strategies for how you can easily design your perfect plan for the whole school year.