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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 5; September 2000

Pilgrims Course Outline

Pilgrims year-round international teacher training workshops

Pilgrim's main teacher training work takes place in April , when Thailand has its long school holiday, and in June, July, August and September. However we also run a "roving workshop" programme all the year round and the motto of this service is we come to you.

Where have Pilgrims trainers worked in the September 1999 to September 2000 academic period? Let me pick some examples from a rather long list:

October 1999. Mario Rinvolucri did workshops for JALT members in Nagoya, Hiroshima, Takushima, Matsuyama and Osaka , (part of a " 4 corners" JALT tour of Japan.)

February 2000 Gill Johnson did a one week TT course for adult and secondary teachers at the British Council in Brussels, Belgium

February 2000. Mario Rinvolucri worked with State Secondary teachers in Munich, Germany, and did a day's training for MELTA, the Bavarian business English teachers' association.

March 2000. Bonnie Tsai worked in Paris, France, with an elite group of primary school teachers.

March 2000. Sheelagh Deller worked with teachers from the big private schools in Zagreb, Croatia.

April 2000 Sheelagh Deller worked with teachers in a business English School in Montevideo, Uruguay, and with various professional groups in Santiago de Chile.

May 2000 Jim Wingate teacher-trained in several secondary schools and Universities in the vast 160 km long stretch of Istanbul, Turkey.

September 2000. John Morgan worked for two weeks in Terni and Orvieto, near Rome, Italy, helping primary school teaches improve their English.

If you want a teacher training workshop in your place for 3 hours, for a day, for 3 days, for a week or more please contact us:

Snail: Pilgrims/ Orchard St/ Canterbury/ UK

If some one in, say, Oulu, wants a workshop in their school, we would try to find other people in Finland who also want workshops, so that travel costs can be shared.

Pilgrims can call on a network of internationally well-known people, like those mentioned above, to run a workshop in your city/ valley/island/town.

Cost to you is in the £400 or $600 dollar area per six clock-hour day.

Here is a menu of topics we have been asked to offer over the past three years:

  • Managing creativity in the classroom
  • The learner as resource
  • Role reversal and doubling work in EFL
  • Vocab teaching made easy
  • Developing teacher confidence
  • Humanistic criteria in materials development and exploitation
  • Video in the EFL classroom
  • Story telling ( primary)
  • Getting students to tell their own stories (secondary + adult)
  • How to vary the effect you produce by varying your story-telling ( sec+ adult)
  • Helping children with emotional problems
  • Two thinking frame works, one from Rogerian Counselling and one from TA.
  • Sensory Grammar
  • Working with Multiple Intelligences ( Gardner)
  • 25 ways of using dictation
  • Using Language 1 judiciously in the L2 classroom
  • Teaching people who are between advanced learner and native speaking.
  • Creative writing
  • Practical exercises based on the work of Orage, drawing on that of Gurdjieff
  • Make'em laugh! Humour in the classroom
  • Grammar and movement
  • Using NLP ideas in the EFL classroom
  • Introduction to intensive, empathetic listening
  • Voice in language teaching
  • Teacher self-management
  • Working one-to-one
  • Mutual supervision for teachers
  • Introducing the classic work of Alan Duff and Alan Maley
  • Humanising language testing
  • Helping students explore their own processes
  • Correction techniques
  • Techniques for involving huge classes
  • Person-centred listening comprehension techniques
  • Ideas from Gattegno's Silent Way
  • Teaching suggestopaedically
  • Humanising the multimedia room
  • Guided visualisations
  • Techniques based on Urbain and Dufeu's "psychodramaturgie linguistique"
  • Relaxation techniques
  • The humanistic primary school classroom
  • The fifth skill: techniques for working with internal monologue and dialogue
  • Work with students around their handwriting styles
  • Ways of breathing life into your coursebook
  • EFL writer's workshop.

    You may have areas you would like us to deal with which are not included in the above menu. If you outline your needs clearly we can see if we can help you satisfy them.

    Please get in touch.

    Mario Rinvolucri


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