Who is this webinar for?
Please note the content of this webinar is not aimed at teachers, and is specifically for Teacher Educators who have a role in supporting the professional development of English language teachers.
What is this webinar about?
This interactive webinar is the first in our second series for teacher educators and is facilitated by Annamaria Pinter, a Reader at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick and Rama Mathew ELT consultant and retired Professor of Education from the University of Delhi. During the webinar we define and discuss self-directed learning and autonomy in English language classrooms as relevant for both teachers and learners and discuss how teachers participating in action research projects, i.e. exploring their own practice in collaboration with their learners, has the potential to accelerate their development and facilitate sustainable self-directed learning. The webinar draws on Annamaria and Rama’s publication Children and teachers as co-researchers in Indian primary English classrooms, and highlights implications for practice relevant for teachers and teacher educators.
When?
Recorded on 25 April 2023 12.00 - 13.00 (UK time).
About the speakers
Annamaria Pinter is a Reader at the Department of Applied Linguistics, the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests focus on all aspects of second/ foreign language education for children, task-based second language teaching, and engaging children actively in research. She has published widely in the area of teaching English to children and has a strong international reputation in TEYL and second language teacher education. She is the author of Teaching Young Language Learners Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers, Oxford University Press (second edition, 2017) and Children Learning Second Languages, Palgrave Macmillan (2011). She is currently joint series editor of Early Language Learning in School Contexts by Multilingual Matters and the author of a new book entitled Engaging Children in Applied Linguistics Research by Cambridge University Press, due to come out in 2023.
Rama Mathew is an ELT consultant and retired as Professor of Education from the University of Delhi where she was also Dean of the Faculty of Education. She taught at the EFL University (Hyderabad) for several years. She has been involved in several teacher development and assessment projects including the English in Action project in Bangladesh and published articles and books in the area. She was a lead mentor for the British Council funded ELT classroom research projects during 2013-2020. More recently she completed work on a project in Sierra Leone where she supported teachers to carry out classroom- based research. She was the country coordinator for the 8th AALA (Asian Association for Language Assessment) international conference held in October 2022 in Chennai. Her research interests include language assessment, teaching English to young learners, CPD of teachers, multilingual education and making English accessible to learners online.
Supporting material for this webinar
- Read the associated research: 'Children and teachers as co-researchers in Indian primary English classrooms'.
This handbook offers a set of activities that teachers tried out in the Indian school classrooms with children of 8 to 14 years old.