Online Teacher Development – Preparing Your Students for Exams

Objectives

These courses are designed to allow teachers to improve and practise their English from the comfort of their own home, while also allowing them the chance to gain a greater understanding of the exams they teach and how best to prepare their students. The courses have a customised element to them and participants will be asked to complete a needs analysis form before the start of the course.

Language Development

This part of the online course is designed to help you improve your fluency and command of English in stimulating ways. We use a range of resources, materials and approaches and cover areas such as: advanced language practice, including idiomatic range, appropriacy and accuracy of expression, current usage, collocation, style and register, metaphorical and imaginative use of language, grammatical review, expansion of vocabulary, development of oral fluency and also pronunciation with emphasis on the features of connected speech.

Where possible, we try to exploit the Language Development stage of the course to show-case more creative ways of presenting and practising language. These will be techniques that the participants may be able to exploit when they are in their own classrooms.

In addition, we will pinpoint how a particular piece of language may be useful for the exams that their students might be preparing for and how to adapt teaching techniques for exam purposes.

Exam Preparation

This Exam Preparation course is aimed at teachers who teach or intend to teach mainstream international exams. The most common exams would be Cambridge B2 and C1 (First and Advanced) and IELTS. We focus on: syllabus, strategies for improving exam technique, developing students’ competence in the four skills within the context of their exam and supporting students in the learning process. There are opportunities for teachers to participate in micro-teaching exam techniques. Feedback is provided.

Where possible, teachers are encouraged to have a copy of their course books with them so that there can be practical trouble-shooting and an opportunity to share ideas on lesson planning.

Often the most valuable aspect of these courses is when education practitioners from around the world share ideas with the rest of the group.

Suitability

This courses is aimed at teachers of English who are preparing students for mainstream international exams of English, primarily Cambridge B2 (First); Cambridge C1 (Advanced) and IELTS.  They will need to have a minimum level of CEFr B2 and above.

How does it work?

We use Zoom for our lessons. Click here for a short manual.

We recognise that sitting in front of a computer is not always comfortable. As a result our teaching method involves students being online for an hour followed by an hour when the students are offline working on exercises or tasks.

The students then return online for another hour of work with their classmates and the teacher.

Course dates 2023

• Summer course: 26/06/2023 – 30/06/2023 (1 week)
• Autumn course: 23/10/2023 – 27/10/2023 (1 week)

Course fees 2023

Registration fee: £30

Tuition fee: £230 per week

Full terms and conditions for online courses available here.

Sample timetable

Course arranged in UK times.