Dear HLT Readers,

Welcome to the February 2023 issue of HLT.

Frist some great news. Pilgrims will be running its Teacher Training programme in Ireland for the second year in a row. This year we will be working on the beautiful campus of the University of Galway.

Galway is a city perched on the west coast of Ireland, it is famous for its sheer beauty and for being the cultural capital of Ireland with its many festivals, galleries and events. Galway is one of Ireland’s most iconic and picturesque cities, and if you like music, culture and the arts, it is the place for you.

Please take a look at the courses we will offer this summer, and remember all our courses are eligible for Erasmus+ funding. On top of our courses in Galway, we will be running courses in Segovia. You will find our downloadable course details in Letter from Chaz Pugliese, Director of Education and Teacher Training, Pilgrims.

We also may have a chance to meet at IATEFL Harrogate, UK, this April. Please look out for Chaz Pugliese, myself and other Pilgrims trainers who will be attending and presenting at the conference. I am sure I will make many contacts or refresh contacts which will result in many articles published in HLT, and we will  bring some IATEFL news.

In this issue I am mainly responsible for the Publications section in which you will find reviews, information on new titles, an article on developing materials and many others.

Now I would like to introduce the host editors of the February issue: Kateřina Sedláčková, Štěpánka Bilová and Libor Štěpánek, from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. I am very happy as this issue is very close to my heart. It is because 7 years ago Masaryk University hosted the April 2016 issue of HLT.

Dear Friends welcome back. Working with you has been a great pleasure.

A big THANK YOU and over to you.

 

Hania (Hanna)  Kryszewska
HLT Magazine Editor
Email: hania.kryszewska@pilgrimsteachertraining.eu

 

 

Dear HLT Readers,

This issue of HLT presents language teaching at the Masaryk University Language Centre, Brno, Czech Republic. This is the second issue hosted by our centre; the first was published seven years ago. Back in 2016, the idea to dedicate an entire issue to the activities of a university language centre came from a series of discussions, meetings and conferences. It represented an attempt to maximise the benefits of the successful exchange of ideas at that time and the potential in connecting language teaching and language research, which often seemed to be developing in isolation from each other. The current issue reflects more recent changes in language education, including, of course, the post-Covid reality.  

At the Masaryk University Language Centre (Centrum jazykového vzdělávání; CJV MU), as at other institutions of higher education, efforts to continue teaching at a high level under all kinds of exceptional circumstances have led to the development of new approaches, strategies and methods. Our aim here is to address a range of those innovative practices and classic ideas applied in new contexts related to language teaching in a university setting. 

Before we introduce our texts, however, we would like to give some context. With over a hundred employees serving 10,000 students each term, CJV MU (www.cjv.muni.cz) is the largest language centre in the Czech Republic. It provides language education and support services for general, academic and specific purposes for Masaryk University students, its staff, and the public. Our activities also aim at enhancing international collaboration and the continuous exchange of knowledge, ideas and information on a worldwide scale. 

For this issue, we have chosen texts that demonstrate a wide range of our activities, past learning and teaching experience, future plans, as well as experimental and novel concepts with the potential for collaboration. With an emphasis on variety, we have selected a range of topics for the different HLT sections in order to link the Various Articles supported by theory to the practical examples of activities in the Golden Classics and Lesson Ideas sections. 

The Various Articles section is divided into three parts: motivation, feedback, and methods and approaches, which represent key areas in our innovative efforts. In the Motivation subsection, the first paper, Visual Representations as a Means to Motivate Students and Curb Feelings of Isolation in Distance Learning, written by Alena Hradilová and Barbora Chovancová, discusses the various benefits of teachers implementing visual content and pictorial disclosure of themselves into their lessons. It also presents concrete examples of how this can be done not only within teaching activities but also as a tool for building a community and promoting students’ well-being. In the second paper, Linda Doleží addresses the question Why Emotions Matter in Language Learning. Linda shares her experience and views not only on the role of emotions, both positive and negative, in learning a foreign language but also on the role of teachers in influencing them. In the third article, Lust for Learning, Lust for Life: Motivation and Beliefs of Successful Older Learners of English, Jana Kubrická offers insight into teaching a special group of learners, aged between 66 and 85, and recommends a specific approach in which the teacher ensures the learners benefit not only in terms of language learning but also in terms of general well-being. The fourth paper, My Goals: Setting Personal Learning Goals to Promote Learners’ Involvement, authored by Eva Zavadilová, considers the issue of effective goal setting and describes activities in which the teacher assists students in achieving their own learning goals.

The Feedback subsection consists of three articles. The first two offer ideas and tips on implementing peer feedback into presentation skills practice, and the third shows how corpus tools can support feedback provision on learners’ writing. In her paper Scaffolding Presentation Skills with Peer Feedback and Assessment, Blanka Pojslová describes the process of how peer feedback became part of the fully fledged assessment of Business English students’ presentations. Blanka explains and gives examples of three forms of peer feedback: computer-mediated feedback to a recorded presentation, oral feedback within small groups, and in-class individual feedback on exam presentations. Eva Rudolfová and Marcela Sekanina Vavřinová also discuss the provision of peer feedback on oral presentations. Their paper, Feedback Time, The Time of Learning: Guiding a STEM-oriented Presenter in Learning to Self-reflect, examines the process of developing presentation skills and feedback provision from the perspective of computer science students and their language teachers. Based on their experience, Eva and Marcela detail the steps which appear to be crucial for improving their students’ communication and reflective skills. Blanka Pojslová also authored the article Enhancing Teacher Feedback on Student Writing with SkELL, which outlines the benefits of incorporating a user-friendly web-based corpus tool into teachers’ feedback. It describes the basic functionalities of SkELL and offers specific tips on how corpus information can be added to indirect feedback.

The final subsection on Methods and Approaches includes three papers dealing with vocabulary, student autonomy, and real-life skills development. Jana Kubrická presents another example of using a corpus tool in language lessons, this time for Exploring Technical Vocabulary in the ESP Classroom with Sketch Engine. She describes a technique for building vocabulary by analysing the more general, metaphorical meanings of technical phrases while concordancing the vocabulary items. In the article A Stitch (of Self-regulated Learning) in Time Saves Nine, Martina Šindelářová Skupeňová shares practical tips for developing learners’ autonomy in any university language course and explains why she considers striving for more student autonomy important and meaningful. Finally, Dita Hochmanová presents a way of Raising Students’ Employability by Targeting Transferable Skills in Task-based Teaching when designing a course focused on real-life tasks which aim to bridge the gap between graduates’ competences and their future employers’ requirements.

The 21st Century Skills section contains three texts on teaching activities employing online tools. If you are interested in creative learning applications, you will certainly find Escape Game as a Revision Tool inspiring as Kateřina Chudová provides a guide to creating your own escape game. Though the activity is online, Kateřina illustrates how the game can be used in a classroom setting so that the teacher can monitor student progress and students can cooperate in teams. If your learners are keen but you do not feel like preparing a complex online activity yourself, you can let them express their creativity by producing podcasts or memes. The paper Casting a Podcasting Spell: Legal English Podcasts International, written by Štěpánka Bilová, Radmila Doupovcová and Barbora Chovancová, provides a step-by-step account of an international project in which students prepared group podcasts. You can find inspiration whether from the project as a whole or from some of the many tips included. In From Genes to Memes: Meme-based Activities in the ESP Classroom, Markéta Dudová gives not only practical examples of implementing memes into your lessons but also fun facts about the history of the word “meme” itself. 

The Lesson Ideas section includes a wide range of activities related mainly to speaking, writing and vocabulary practice. Ladislav Václavík presents a number of lesson modifications for preparing and presenting short news in Business News: A Short Activity for Students of Business English. If your learners struggle with the third conditional, you will find useful teaching ideas in Disbarred Barristers and the Like: A Creative Take on the Third Conditional by Štěpánka Bilová, Radmila Doupovcová and Barbora Chovancová. While the authors illustrate their activity on examples using legal English, the procedure can be easily adapted for general English or other ESP lessons. Natália Gachallová and Andrea Salayová share two Creative Group Exercises as an Educational Tool in Teaching Professional Language which provide intensive vocabulary practice related to biology, accidents, and parts of the body. In the next paper, Internationalizing the (Legal Spanish) Curriculum – Three Activities to Nurture Motivation and Intercultural Competence, Veronika De Azevedo Camacho describes lessons into which an expert speaker is invited, online or face-to-face, and learners are given a series of tasks related to the guest and their respective area of expertise. Veronika Dvořáčková in her paper Authenticity in Teaching ESP Genre-Based Writing – When Does It Work? compares the use of two professional text types in medicine—letter of referral and reflective writing—as learning activities and discusses the relevance and value of authentic genres in language lessons as such. Writing is the focus of the last two texts, in which the authors share their experience from teaching academic writing. Joe Lennon is Asking the “Big Questions” about Academic Writing: A Lesson Plan and Some Reflections while introducing some elements of a course design and lesson ideas in which he encourages students not only to write but also to think and talk about (their) academic writing. David Zelený, on the other hand, describes a specific activity in Where to Start? Discussing Academic Writing. Using word clusters, he draws his students’ attention to basic academic writing principles.

The Golden Classics section covers the areas of pronunciation, using visuals and role-playing. In his Introduction to Word and Sentence Stress, Antonín Zita presents three activities which can be adapted for individual as well as group work. If your students need to practise phrases describing graphs in English, you can readily apply the ideas from Problem-solving Using Visuals: The Spread of a Rumour in which Eva Čoupková shares a time-tested speaking exercise in which students are efficiently prompted to use language related to graphs and variables. In the last text in the section, Daniela Dlabolová describes how to prepare learners for a Role-play in Biochemistry Debate to enable them to experience a playful discussion, in this case on fruitarianism, in which they can easily support their assertions with valid arguments and interpret the content innovatively.  

In the Voices section, Petra Trávníková presents how her students view their language learning process in retrospect. Her paper, Language Learning Histories – What Do They Tell Us About Our Students’ Learning?­, summarizes her students’ accounts of their learning and demonstrates how teachers can benefit from using such accounts and what kind of transformation narrative can help students become efficient learners.

Bringing the papers together for this issue has been another great experience for the Masaryk University Language Centre. We greatly value the fact that the texts presented here were written by teachers who were conducting research or self-reflexion on their own practices. These texts reveal their own struggles, offer suggestions for alternative ways to teach languages, and provide insights into how teachers view themselves, their students and their work. We hope that your practice will benefit from their experiences, concepts and ideas, and personal reflections and that further discussion on language teaching will ensue. 

We wish you an enjoyable and inspiring reading.

 

Kateřina Sedláčková, Štěpánka Bilová and Libor Štěpánek
Host Editors
HLT Magazine