In 2024, we want to take our annual teacher training program further and offer a deeper dive into effective preparation for PTE Academic.
The "Around the World with PTE Academic 2024" is a series of eight webinars designed for PTE teachers and preparation providers.
These sessions aim to provide the audience with advanced knowledge into some of the most challenging and important aspects of PTE Academic and cover developing advanced skills to maximise the chances of test takers achieving their desired scores.
From March 11 until October 10, 2024.
Pearson English Assessment
Our primary objective is to inspire and encourage educators to discover, experiment, and gain knowledge about our exceptional testing solutions including Pearson English International Certificate, the Level Test, Benchmark Test, and English Benchmark Young Learners.
Moreover, our sessions offer substantial opportunities for teacher development and provide exposure to our ELT courseware that can be used in exam preparation courses. In 2022, we launched our first Teacher Training Academy, and this year we aim to elevate it further.
From March 28 to November 21, 2024
The session emphasizes the importance of setting clear learning objectives and aligning assessment strategies to accurately measure individual student growth.
In this webinar, we will focus on the different question types in the PTE Academic framework that are commonly assessed in classroom settings. We will provide practical methods and insightful techniques that will enable educators to seamlessly evaluate students' speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills. Our goal is to present tips that will help educators deliver constructive feedback and facilitate improvement in their students' performance.
In this session, we will discuss our experience with employing digital progress solutions to meet students' needs and enhance the learning experience.
In this session, we will discuss our experience with employing digital progress solutions to cater to young learners' needs and optimize the learning experience.
In this session, we'll bring an accomplished individual who has excelled in PTE Academic and their preparation teacher. Hear first-hand about their journeys, strategies, and the mindset that propelled them to success.
This webinar aims to provide participants with practical tools and approaches to enhance their speaking and listening skills, which are essential for effective communication.
The 23rd of April marks the birth (and death) of William Shakespeare: poet, playwright and pre-eminent dramatist. His poems and plays have been translated into 80 languages, even Esperanto and Klingon.
It is remarkable how Shakespeare’s iconic body of work has withstood the test of time. More than four centuries on, his reflections on the human condition have lost none of their relevance. Contemporary artists and writers continue to draw on his language, imagery and drama for inspiration.
But, despite the breadth and longevity of his appeal, getting students excited about Shakespeare is not always straightforward. The language is challenging, the characters may be unfamiliar and the plots can seem far removed from modern life.
However, with the right methods and resources, there is plenty for teenagers and young adults to engage with. After all, love, desperation, jealousy and anger are feelings we can all relate to, regardless of the age group, culture or century we belong to!
So, how can you bring classic Shakespearean dramas like Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth to life?
There are many ways for your learners to connect with Shakespeare and get excited by his works. Here we’ll show you three classroom activities to do with your students and some indispensable resources to ensure that reading Shakespeare is as accessible and enjoyable as possible!
Critical thinking is a 21st century skill that has been around for thousands of years. There are records of Socrates using critical thinking skills in his teaching in 4th century BC Greece. In recent years though, critical thinking has again become more prominent in education.
Critical thinking requires students to do more than remember and repeat information. Instead, it encourages them to analyze, examine, evaluate and use their problem-solving abilities through questioning, theorizing and rationalizing to have a deeper understanding of the world around them, both inside the classroom and beyond.
In the past, success in education was largely based on the ability to remember facts and figures. However, the skills which our students need today go further than memorization. With our rapidly evolving technology, the internet, and the bewildering amount of information online, it is essential that our students can use higher-order thinking skills to analyze and assess the information they are presented with.
We all know the importance of looking ahead and planning for the future. We can encourage this skill in our students and directly relate it to their learning.
At the start of the course, take a moment to chat with each student individually and ask them to identify an objective for the first part of the year. You may like to brainstorm possible objectives as a class first, but it’s important for students to determine their own personal objectives, rather than imposing objectives on them.
During the first half of the year you can talk to each student about their progress and ask them to assess to what extent they’re achieving their goals.
The key point comes at the end of the semester when students evaluate their progress and set a new objective for the following one.
The ability to analyze options, risks and opinions will help your students in the future in many situations, including when they decide which course to take at university or which job to take.
You can practice this skill by providing students with relatable situations and asking them to analyze and compare the options.
For example:
Imagine you are taking a trip with some friends this summer. You have a number of different options and want to discuss them before finalizing your plans. Talk to a partner about the different trips and decide which would be best:
Students also need to have an awareness of the consequences of their actions; this is a skill which is transferable to making business decisions, as well as being important in their everyday lives.
To practice this skill, put students into small groups and give them the first part of a conditional sentence. One student completes the sentence and then the next student adds a consequence to that statement.
For example:
Student A: If I don’t study for my English exam, I won’t pass.
Student B: If I don’t pass my English exam, my parents won’t let me go out this weekend.
Student C: If I can’t go out this weekend, I’ll miss the big football match.
Student D: My coach won’t let me play next year if I miss the big match.
By giving students more responsibility and having them feel invested in the development of the lesson, they will be much more motivated to participate in the class.
Occasionally, let students discuss the content of the day’s class. Give them a list of tasks for the day, including how long each will take and allow them to discuss the order in which they’ll complete them. For larger classes, first have them do it in pairs or small groups and then vote as a whole class.
Write on the board:
The following tasks can be done in the order you decide as a class. You have five minutes to discuss and arrange the tasks as you choose. Write them on the board in order when you’re ready.
Take this one step further by asking your students to rate each activity out of 10 at the end of the class. That way, you’ll easily see which tasks they enjoy, helping you plan more engaging lessons in the future.
Reading can transport students to new places, immerse them in incredible adventures and teach them more about the amazing world around them.
What’s more, in today’s globalized world our students are exposed to written English more and more every day. It’s essential they have the skills needed to be successful in this environment. Many students are also going on to study in English at university and require a number of academic reading skills.
It’s important you work on these areas in class to prepare learners for their future. Here are seven reading strategies to get you started including tips for both primary and secondary teachers.
Even before students start reading, we can use extra information on the page to get them thinking about the ideas and vocabulary they will find in the text. This encourages them to consider what they may already know about the topic. And, by adding an element of competition, we can also use it as a strategy to motivate them to read.
Divide the class into teams and write the title of the text on the board. Have them work in their teams and write ten words they predict will be in the text, based on the title.
After a few minutes, have teams swap lists and, as they read the text, check the words the other team correctly predicted.
If you are teaching primary, you can do the same activity using any images which accompany the text. Have students describe the image in pairs first and then work in teams to predict the article's content, as above.
This strategy can focus on both the general idea of the text (the gist), and the most important details within it.
To work on using summarizing for gist, give students a text and three short summaries of it, no longer than a sentence each. After students scan the text once, have them choose which of the three summaries best matches the general idea of the text.
Then, to practice these skills, have them work in pairs to produce a summary of the text they just read. This summary should be approximately one-fifth the length of the original text.
This not only encourages students to identify the text's main points but also requires them to use paraphrasing skills to put the ideas into their own words.
Note that primary learners may need your support to create a summary. It’s a good idea to create a gapped text which they can complete with the keywords of the text. This will also help build their vocabulary.
Whether your students are reading for gist or detail, a topic sentence can give them the necessary information. Topic sentences are found at the start of a paragraph and are frequently used in articles and academic research to give the reader the main idea of what is to come. If you are unsure what a topic sentence looks like, the first sentence of this paragraph is an example!
One idea to introduce students to the idea of topic sentences is to find a text with four or five paragraphs and remove the topic sentence from each.
Give the students the gapped text and the topic sentences and have them match each sentence to the correct paragraph. This will highlight how topic sentences provide a summary of the main idea of each paragraph.
This can be an effective task for both primary and secondary students, though it’s likely that primary students will be working with shorter texts. If you have a text with only three paragraphs, you can write a couple of distractor sentences to make the activity more challenging.
As with any aspect of language learning, if students can create a personal connection to the content, they will be more engaged and more likely to remember the information.
We can use compare and contrast questions with any text. For example, for texts which tell a personal story, we can ask:
For texts which talk about a particular issue, we can ask:
Students of any age should be allowed to reflect on their learning and have the chance to empathize with the people and situations they read about. Even for younger learners, questions can be graded to their level to allow them to compare their experiences to the content of the text.
Non-fiction texts often include a lot of facts and figures and it’s important that students are able to understand what these numbers mean so they can really understand the text.
Our younger learners might need help appreciating long distances or large quantities, so providing them with something more tangible can help them greatly.
When working with distances and sizes, try to use familiar locations, such as the length of the school playground or the area of the classroom, and compare these locations to the measurement in the text.
Similarly with quantities, find something which students can relate to easily. For example, if a text talks about the number of people, compare that amount to the number of students in the class.
Teaching students how to use a dictionary is important, but it’s also essential that students can use other skills to understand new words when they can’t reach for a dictionary.
As teachers, it’s important for us to identify the keywords in a text which we want students to remember and use after the lesson. You may choose to pre-teach this vocabulary so that students can approach the reading with a good understanding of the key lexis.
However, there may be times when you want students to predict the meaning – of key and subsidiary vocabulary – from the context. It’s helpful to teach students to read around unfamiliar words as this helps them to identify the type of word it is (noun, verb, adjective, and so on), which helps them understand a particular word’s meaning within a sentence.
While many texts our students read are factual, there will be times when they also need to distinguish between fact and opinion.
Sometimes, we can infer the writer’s attitude towards a topic by looking at the type of language they use and identifying whether words are neutral, or if they give us clues as to the writer’s opinion. This can be a difficult distinction for our students to make but we can do activities with the students to raise their awareness.
Take a subject students are likely to have different opinions about, such as a famous footballer. Ask the students to tell you about that person, then categorize the words they give you as to whether they provide a fact or an opinion. Words such as tall, Brazilian and blue eyes would be facts about the player. Whereas amazing, stupid or the best player ever would show their opinion.
