Alastair Graham-Marr, teaches full-time at Tokai University's Shonan campus and is author of Communication Spotlight, published by ABAX. He'll make two presentations:
1. Teaching the Strategies of Speaking: helping students with fluency, involvement and clarification strategies
All of us use strategies when we speak. We use strategies to confirm or clarify what we're saying and what we're hearing. We use strategies to show interest, to maintain and develop conversations. We use strategies that help with fluency. Learners of English in particular use strategies to compensate for their lack of language. Helping students be aware of and learn to apply different communication strategies is both motivating and a knowledge they can put to immediate use.
2. Teaching Listening to Low-Level Learners
Teaching listening effectively means teaching both phonology and knowledge of discourse. A working knowledge of the phonology of natural connected speech, elisions and liaisons, weak forms and reductions helps students with their 'bottom-up' decoding skills. Developing student knowledge of discourse, particularly of scripts (those discourses in English that tend to follow a set pattern) helps them with their 'top-down' predictive skills.
This event is co-sponsored by ABAX publishing. Dinner and drinks at a nearby restaurant will follow the meeting.
