Workshop with Dr. Jun Liu: “Insights into Teaching ESL to Chinese Speakers”

Friday, October 21, 3 - 5 p.m., including Q & A session

Refreshments will be served. Maximum participants: 30

Language students’ perception of the appropriateness or validity of a teaching methodology is often not the same as the teacher.  Dr. Liu will elaborate on his own experience in teaching and learning second languages in various contexts.  Insights will be presented about how to help students adapt to a new teaching methodology in a new culture.

Dr. Jun Liu, TESOL president in 2006 – 2007, earned his Ph.D. in Foreign and Second Language Education from Ohio State University.  He is currently the Associate Provost for International Initiatives at Georgia State University.  He was the head of the Department of English at the University of Arizona from 1998 to 2011 and also served as Assistant Vice Provost for Global Initiatives.  In 2007, he became the director of the Confucius Institute. He is a nationally recognized leader in the teaching of English and Chinese to speakers of other languages.

Workshop with Dr. Joe Barcroft and Dr. Kara McBride: “Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: What Recent Research Tells Us”

Friday, October 21, 3 - 5 p.m.

Refreshments will be served. Maximum participants: 30

What are ways to help ESL students learn new vocabulary most effectively? Research shows that some of the answers to this question can be surprising. This workshop provides hands-on training on how to implement these findings in the classroom. We will first review some of the recent research in this field and then introduce the evidence-based foundations of Input-Based Incremental (IBI) Vocabulary Instruction (Barcroft, 2004, 2005). Workshop attendees will become familiar with the 10 principles of IBI vocabulary instruction and the 7 key guidelines for designing and implementing IBI activities.

Participants are asked to bring one or more texts that they currently use to work with during the workshop. Written and spoken language sources will be considered, as well as either paper-based or technology-based activities.

Dr. Joe Barcroft holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Second Language Acquisition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is Associate Professor of Spanish and Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include second language vocabulary acquisition; input processing; processing resource allocation during lexical acquisition; the bilingual mental lexicon; and psycholinguistic approaches to other issues in second language acquisition and bilingualism.

Dr. Kara McBride has a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona. She has given professional development and teacher training workshops in the St. Louis area and abroad. Her research areas include intercultural competence, computer-assisted language learning, listening comprehension and foreign language pronunciation.