Since the 1980s, much has been made of the summer slide – the loss of knowledge that takes place when students are out of school on their long vacation. What exactly does this mean? And is it really a thing? In 2021, educators will also face the knock-on effects of an academic year spent teaching remotely and supporting homeschooling – giving rise to yet another educational phenomenon: lost learning. How do we address all of these issues – to ensure that our students don’t get left behind?
In this session, the presenters look at these questions in the context of learning English, combining research findings with practical advice on making your teaching as impactful as possible as the new academic year begins.
Effective use of all workplace competencies begins with good communication skills. As the global language of business and research, it is widely accepted that the ability to communicate effectively in English is now a basic employability skill. With COVID-19 continuing to reshape the future of how and where we work, the latest research suggests that soft skills have never been more valued by employers.
Using digital tools to plan and teach lessons is now the new normal as we adjust to the current trends in education.
In this session, new features of the teacher toolkit are explored and we discuss how you can use these tools to move your lesson planning from your desk to your desktop.
In this session we provide an overview of the General English course Roadmap and how it is suited for online classes. We start by briefly summarising the research that influenced the design of the course, before looking at the twin track approach to teaching speaking and the other skills, and how to teach those online. We also show how it provides a great degree of flexibility to help you navigate the different needs of your learners and teaching environment.
With the pandemic continuing to limit face-to-face interactions, many of our adult (and new graduate) students will be facing the already stressful interview process online. Interviewing via video conference or submitting a video of themselves as part of the process has already become the new norm. This is daunting for the best of us and potentially doubly-worrying for non-native English speakers.
This session provides practical tips and strategies to support teachers in helping students overcome interview anxiety and better prepare for online job interviews in English.
What we can control: planning, prioritising and organising skills for students and teachers.
Times of great uncertainty like these can cause a great deal of stress as so much is both unpredictable and out of our control. However, despite everything, we still need to help our students develop both their language skills, and their abilities to deal successfully with the world of work in future (whatever that may look like).
In this webinar, Rachael Roberts looks at some practical strategies that English teachers like you can use to not only get yourself more organised and in control of what you can actually control, but that can also be used in regular classroom (or online classroom) activities to help your students improve their planning, prioritising and organising skills.
In the past, the only way to quickly and easily score second language performance was to make questions that could be objectively scored (such as multiple choice, matching, etc.). But we all know that the world we live in requires us to produce language for communication, not choose A, B, or C.
Performance assessments including interviews, scenarios and conversations are becoming more valued but the required human judgement comes with the cost of extra time and effort, scheduling, training, subjectivity… and scoring rubrics!
At Pearson we use many of these scoring rubrics as the basis for our automated scoring systems which drives our assessments like the Versant English Tests and PTE Academic.
In this session, we share best practices about how to design and write good rubrics and discuss how you can incorporate them into your own classroom assessments and grading practices.
With traditional testing methods still disrupted, many schools, universities and companies have needed to think creatively about how to assess achievement and proficiency.
In this session we look at different models for testing in the COVID-19 era, as well as some of the positive and negative responses to the idea of assessing learners at home, and cover test tips and lessons learned from the delivery of Versant English Tests with Remote Monitoring.
In this session we discuss how to select the right assessment, based on your needs. We explore the various questions to ask and parameters to consider when choosing a type of assessment. We discuss the various outputs you may receive from an assessment and discuss how best to interpret and use them.
As teachers, we have had to adapt to a new reality: our courses now are mostly online. In this webinar, we look at communicative activities for developing professional English online with reference to activities from the Business Partner series that can be easily adapted and to develop learners’ language skills, alongside their business skills and soft skills.
