Developing phonemic awareness: A follow-up on PIGATE's Special Summer Session, Sat. Aug. 14th

During PIGATE's online gathering on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021, participants explained (showed, and told of) a number of their favorite resources and practical techniques for exploiting songs and stories with language learners. Participants' accounts related to various activities with preschool children and early school-aged (elementary and junior high school) English-as-an-additional language learners in particular.

To those inspiring accounts, which I hope you can review via Zoom meeting recordings,  chat transcripts, and other short reports about PIGATE's August gathering, I'd like to add a pointer to a separate webinar recording. That webinar, from the iDTi 2015 Summer Intensive for Teachers, is about ways of developing learners' phonemic awareness, "necessary prerequisites for studying and reading in English" (idDTi Videos, 2021.08.12, description, ¶2).

About 18 minutes into that webinar recording, Karen Frazier Tsai asserted:

"[W]e need to start first with making our children phonemically aware of the sounds in English, those sounds that are different from whatever their first language is." 

(auto-generated YouTube video transcript, 17:23–17:35)

She then asked and answered the questions: "[W]hat do we do; how do we start … to make them have that skill of really focusing in on the sounds" (transcript, 18:21–18:28, ff.). In sum, Tsai explained various ways of helping learners become aware of sounds, rhymes, and syllables by playing with words in a new language. Whether you're teaching pre-reading to young learners, or simply reading stories to children, I highly recommend watching the webinar recording from beginning to end!

Children Playing with Words

(iTDi Videos, 2021.08.12)

Reference

iTDi Videos. (2021.08.12). Children Playing with Words (Karen Frazier Tsai) [video recording]. https://youtu.be/Br10cHS-5Qk

Revisiting communicative competencies (YouTube recording)

This hour-long recording by Dr. Kate Reynolds of Central Washington University's College of Education and Professional Studies[, Chairperson of the Department of Education, Development, Teaching and Learning,] came out about a year ago. It was from a TESOL Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) webinar on evolving theories and potential applications of a communicative competence framework for language teaching.

Frames and Reframing:

Recent Discussions on Communicative Competencies 

In that webinar, Dr. Reynolds surveyed "recent developments on the model of communicative competencies and [began to] facilitate an interactive conversation on how teacher educators can use this information" (Abstract, 2018.06.26). Though the webinar chat is invisible in the recording, live discussion opened about 33 minutes in. Dr. Reynolds read and summarized chat entries aloud. She then reflected on contributions and issues that arose, and asked clarification and follow-up questions.

At the end of the webinar, Dr. Reynolds highlighted one of over a dozen selected references for further reading. She also offered to share her PowerPoint slides, and expressed desire to continue discussion in audience-initiated TEIS discussion list posts. That's a TESOL members-only venue, so I (Paul) would be happy to see comments from PIGATE reviewers here [on this post].

Reference

• Reynolds, K. M. (2018, June 26). Frames and reframing: Recent discussions on communicative competencies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1aRTjnwAY

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Yippee: A free continuing ed. cert. from edWeb.net!

You, too, can get a certificate like this from edWeb by watching and listening to the webinar recording: Error Correction: Tips and Techniques for Language Teachers.

Screenshot of PDF at ceu.edwebpd.net
(https://goo.gl/K19W66)

EdWeb is a free professional learning network. Its Browse and Search edWebinars pages listed 1564 webinars today (2019.03.06 [JST]) in, just a guess, hundreds of communities. 

Screenshot of Select Community menu

Please check it out, and leave comments on this post to let us know what you think.

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TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop for teachers of young learners

This post is to point out a free, five-week long, online workshop for teachers of young learners—one of many such offerings in TESOL International's Electronic Village Online (EVO) program for 2018.

Teaching EFL to Young Learners
Participants of Teaching EFL to Young Learners TEFL2YL EVO18 will learn about and create activities for English to Young Learners and Teens from around the world using storytelling, board games, action songs, and limited resource classroom activities. ...

Registration starts on [Jan 8, and the _program_ starts] Jan 14, 2018. 

Source: http://evo2018proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/119830158/TEFL2YL, 2017.12.21

If you have a yen for online networking and distance learning, and will have a bit of time to spare between mid-January and February next year, I highly recommend looking into this and other upcoming EVO workshops. 

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Webinar recordings and related resources

Here's a window into a Google spreadsheet in which there's an in-progress list of teacher development websites with webinar recordings and related resources:

If you have recommendations for additions, please mention them the next time we meet, or point them out in comments on this post.

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