Speaking engagements

The transition away from designing language courses based on a traditional grammar syllabus requires a shift in thinking as well as a shift in instruction. In this workshop, attendees will consider both the theoretical basis for Proficiency Oriented, Comprehension Based™ teaching and its practical application. Attendees will explore these concepts through interactive demonstrations taken from the SOMOS Curriculum.

Unpack the definition of Proficiency Oriented Language Instruction (POLI)  and consider its practical application to lesson design! Participants will consider the core elements of POLI then reflect on how they are addressed in a sample Content Based Unit.

Learn effective and engaging strategies to teach in the target language without sacrificing comprehension! Workshop attendees will participate as students in a series of proficiency-oriented activities that students love and that can be done entirely in the target language, regardless of which language they teach, and they will leave with an adaptable template for planning proficiency oriented lessons that maximize student engagement

Unpack the complexities of reading comprehension, and consider what that means for text selection! In this session, the presenter will model how to evaluate text complexity and identify what skills and knowledge a learner needs to understand a given text. Participants will leave with a simple tool to use when selecting texts for language learners.

You’ve pinned hundreds of resources, archived every story script on the Internet, and spent a small fortune building your class library, but you have no idea how to pull it all together. In this session, participants will learn how to focus their attention on what matters most and how to follow a logical unit-mapping sequence to develop coherent, compelling, culturally rich units.

Most language teachers spend the first few weeks each fall reviewing everything that students have forgotten over the summer, only to watch them forget it forever upon graduation. But it is possible for your students to maintain their language proficiency over the summer and across a lifetime. In this introductory workshop, you’ll experience first-hand how Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS®) uses compelling, comprehensible input to build lifelong language proficiency in students and restore the joy of teaching.