ELT Academic Reading Group

The ELT Academic Reading Group in St. Gallen, Switzerland has been meeting monthly since January 2016.

The aim of the group is to discuss a different academic article each month related to various aspects of English Language Teaching. For example, we discuss the research and findings, how these can be applied to our classrooms and any relevant experience and opinions on this aspect of ELT.

This group is open and free to all teachers from any background/ type of institution you don’t have to have a Masters or be a member of ETAS just a keen interest in all things related to English teaching. This will be an informal group and a great place to meet like-minded teachers and share ideas.

Articles and summaries of meetings will be posted here. If you don’t live in St. Gallen but would like to join in then you can comment on related articles after meetings.

Here’s the details of the 1st meeting on Vocabulary Myths (January 2016).

Here’s the summary of the 2nd meeting on Bottom-Up / Top-Down Listening (February 2016)

You can find the summary for April’s meeting on Fluency vs Accuracy here.

May’s meeting was on Reflective ELT Practice and you can find the summary here.

Here’s the summary from our June meeting on Teaching Reading Comprehension

October’s meeting was on Corrective Feedback, you can find the summary here

In November we discussed English as a Lingua Franca and what impact this has on our students (summary coming soon…)

In February the topic was Reconceptualizing Interactional Groups

March’s topic was Playschool for grown-ups Changing the rules of the game in language teaching

In April we read the article Technology in the Classroom and discussed these questions: Qs Tech in the Classroom

May’s discussion group was slightly different insofar as we discussed an IATEFL plenary instead of reading a text, we chose Sarah Mercer’s talk: Connecting minds: language learner and teacher psychologies .   The following points were discussed: ARG May Qs.

In June the article and topic: The ‘What_, ‘Why_ and ‘How_ of Needs Assessment for Adult ESL Learners  was discussed. The following IATEFL talk by Brian Tomlinson also brings up some interesting ideas on this topic: https://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2017/session/lets-listen-learners

October’s topic was the Demand High methodology. The discussion was based on this article. *Thanks to ELT Springboard in Bern for the idea 🙂

In November we discussed Flipped Learning, based on this blog post by ELT Research Bites and corresponding article.

On January 19th we discussed how we teach writing based on this post: Critical Thinking and Beginning Writing Skills

February’s discussion was based on the sharing of our teacher journals, we used this article as a basis.

The meetings are on the second / third Friday of .every month (depending on everyone’s availability) at 09:30 in the Migros Bahnhof Cafeteria.

The next meeting is on the 21st September and we’ll be discussing student-centered learning in general, but also looking at findings from this research article.

Please comment below or email if you’d like to come along: gemma_lunn@hotmail.com