***UPDATE***
Leo’s workshop will be going ahead but with a new time and will also be moved online and delivered via Zoom. The topic has also changed accordingly.
When: Sat 25 April 2020, 10-12:30PM ***new time***
Where: online via Zoom (see the Ning for the link)
Registration: Due to technological limitations, our online events are currently only open to ELTABB and ELTA members. Members can RSVP on the Ning; other ELTA members can email events@eltabb.com
Gap-fill exercises, in which learners have to fill in the blanks with missing words, are often criticized for promoting only receptive knowledge of vocabulary. Grammar gap-fills, on the contrary, tend to require learners to produce the correct form (e.g. put the verb in the correct tense), bypassing the crucial recognition stage of grammar learning. In addition, both vocabulary and grammar gap fills have been criticized for being unauthentic, mechanical and boring. In this webinar, we will discover how, with a bit of imagination, we can put a ‘spark’ into gap-fill exercises and make them more effective tools for practising new and old vocabulary and grammar. The activities demonstrated in the session are suitable for both online and face-to-face classroom formats.
Leo Selivan has been involved in ELT for more than 15 years in various roles: teacher, examiner, teacher trainer, senior teacher, materials writer, e-moderator. He was lucky to start his teaching career with the British Council in Tel Aviv, where, among other things, he was a content writer for the British Council & BBC website TeachingEnglish. Today, Leo is a freelance lecturer teaching courses in Second Language Acquisition, ELT methodology, Corpus Linguistics and Genre Analysis to pre-service and in-service teachers, and language editors. The list of places where he has given workshops, and mentored teachers and teacher trainers, includes Azerbaijan, Belarus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, and is constantly expanding. His professional writing credits include Lexical Grammar(Cambridge University Press, 2018) and articles in Modern English Teacher, EFL Magazine, The Guardian Education, Humanising Language Teaching as well as his own aptly-named blog Leoxicon (http://leoxicon.blogspot.com).